Voyage to Vitality | Steps towards improving Oral Health
What is the Voyage to Vitality and how can it improve your oral health?
Tribury Dental’s Voyage to Vitality is the system we use to divide true oral health into three manageable parts.
What is a Healthy Dental Foundation?
As we start our quest for true oral vitality, our voyage starts by taking steps towards a healthy foundation. A healthy foundation is what most people think about at the dentist. This includes: healthy gums, no cavities, strong fillings, healthy root canaled teeth, implants, proper fitting plates, crowns, bridges, and more
Root Cause of an Unhealthy Dental Foundation
How Do I Achieve a Healthy Dental Foundation?
Just like everything in life, you need to be realistic about where you are and develop a plan to achieve your goals. The same is true on your trek towards a healthy foundation.
At Tribury Dental, this is done with our New Patient Experience and master plan visits. All new and current patients are offered a chance to meet with Dr. Nicole to have a complete evaluation of their foundation. This will include checking the gums for disease, x-rays to find cavities in between the teeth, and at the ends of the teeth, evaluating the health of previous fillings, performing our basic chewing system evaluation, and taking photos of the teeth with a camera. From there, Dr. Nicole will meet with you one-on-one to discuss where you are and develop a personalized plan for achieving a healthy foundation.
Another unique part of your voyage towards a healthy foundation is joining our Dental Fitness Program. The Dental Fitness Program is our way of evaluating and assessing your current health status. During each recare appointment, our dental hygienist will check your mouth for gum pockets, plaque/bleeding levels, and cavities. These numbers provide us with statistics to let us know how healthy you are at the current moment. It is a great tool to help you maintain a healthy foundation.
The last and most important part of the trek towards a healthy foundation is home care. Within 36 hours (that is a day and a half) of leaving our office, plaque, tartar, and basic schmutz will return to your mouth unless it is properly removed daily. This leads to dentists nagging you to brush and floss – not because we like to, but because it is the only way to maintain a healthy foundation and allow you to keep your teeth for the rest of your life.
Identifying Chewing System Imbalances
Once the foundation is healthy, our voyage continues towards a Healthy Chewing System. Your mouth is a very complicated system of teeth, bones, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, ligaments, and gums. For true oral health, this system must be balanced. Most, over 95%, of people have some sort of chewing system imbalance.
A chewing system imbalance is not something that most dentists address, even though most people have the issue. Some signs and symptoms of a chewing system imbalance include: worn teeth, gum recession, neck and shoulder pain, facial pain, jaw pain, headaches, broken fillings, wiggly teeth with no gum disease present, needing root canals with no cavity present, cracked teeth, fractured fillings, having two bites, clicking and/or popping upon opening, poor sleep, and much more.
Most people consider a chewing system imbalance to be temporomandibular joint disease (TMD/TMJ). TMD is a sign or symptom of a chewing system imbalance. However, we at Tribury Dental feel TMD is only part of the picture. Instead, a chewing system imbalance is a multi-factorial, whole body issue that expresses itself as myofascial pain syndromes, poor sleep, and slow-chronic breakdown of the mouth. How and which symptoms you have are based on your age, gender, level of health, and your body’s ability to compensate for the imbalance.
Root Cause of an Unbalanced Chewing System
The root cause of a chewing system imbalance can be summed up in one statement – lack of proper head and neck development as a child. Over the last 100 years, we have experienced a rapid reduction in the size of our heads and necks. This is not a good thing and it is not due to genetic changes. This reduction in size is due to environmental factures limiting proper development. These factors include: lack of breastfeeding, pollution, allergies, lack of a hard diet, the western diet, and chronic illness.
The lack of proper head and neck development causes the body to have smaller airways, sinuses, and top and bottom jaws. The result is a lack of space to fit 32 teeth properly, not to mention a misalignment of the skeletal system. Think of it this way:, braces and wisdom teeth removal became prominent at the end of the 21st century. This lack of development causes the following issues long term:
- Myofascial pain
- Unbalanced skeletal system
- Excessive force placed on the teeth
- Breakdown of the temporomandibular joints
If you would like more information about this issue, please read the works of the Weston Price Foundation and their book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.”